Will There Ever Be a Better James Bond Movie Than Casino Royale?

Ten years later, Daniel Craig's first outing as 007 remains the franchise's standout and singular achievement.

It has been 10 years to the day since Casino Royale—the 21st James Bond movie, and also the best one—first arrived in theaters.

I'm aware that calling Casino Royale the best Bond movie will enrage some purists, and I don't make this suggestion lightly. For me, choosing a favorite 007 movie is like choosing a favorite child. I'm one of those idiots who loves this franchise enough to have purchased the collection on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray. (Yes, even A View to a Kill.)

But Casino Royale is special: A movie that's good not in spite of being the 21st movie in the 007 franchise, but because it's the 21st movie in the 007 franchise. And looking back a decade later, Casino Royale is somehow even better than the massive, much-needed breath of fresh air it felt like on the day it was released.

Though Casino Royale was the first 007 novel Ian Fleming wrote, a big-screen adaptation turned out to be a particularly difficult mountain to climb. If you want to get technical, the first 007 adaptation was a bastardized version of Casino Royale; Fleming's novel was adapted into a 1954 episode of the TV series Climax! a full eight years before Sean Connery would debut as Bond in Dr. No. The episode stars the potato-faced Barry Nelson as James "Jimmy" Bond—an American agent sent to take down the villainous Le Chiffre (played here, in a much smarter casting choice, by an uber-creepy Peter Lorre).

Casino Royale next reared its head in 1967, when it was adapted into a ghastly film spoof starring Peter Sellers, David Niven, Woody Allen, and Dr. No alum Ursula Andress. Once again, the only reason to watch this—other than morbid curiosity—is to see the actor playing Le Chiffre: Orson Welles, perfectly cast as the short, 252-pound villain Fleming described in the original novel.

It's a shame that we got two weird, off-brand adaptations of Fleming's very first James Bond novel before it ever turned up in the series proper—but the truth is that Casino Royale wouldn't have worked for most of the actors who played Bond before Daniel Craig anyway. The story is too small and too dark and too gutting. Connery might have been able to pull it off before Goldfinger, which shifted the franchise into a lighter, pulpier direction. And if Timothy Dalton's darker take on Bond had caught on with mainstream audiences (and contract negotiations hadn't gotten in the way), Casino Royale might have been exactly the story he was suited to star in.

There was, to be fair, one long-shot chance that an older Bond actor could have taken Casino Royale on. Quentin Tarantino expressed interest in directing a subversive, black-and-white version of Casino Royale, but bailed when he learned MGM planned to replace Pierce Brosnan, whose contract was in flux after starring in four 007 movies.

The decision to reboot the franchise and start fresh with Casino Royale was bolder than it might seem today. Die Another Day, Brosnan's final turn—often written off as a flop today—was actually the highest-grossing James Bond movie of all time. The decision to reboot the franchise was a kind of preemptive strike—a recognition that that Jack Bauers and Jason Bournes of the world were starting to make James Bond look a little creaky. Today, the idea of a dark and gritty reboot has correctly become a much-derided cliche, but after surfing down a glacier and fencing against Madonna, Bond was desperately in need of a dark and gritty reboot.

Ian Fleming's original novel provided the basic framework: a short, grim story about a secret agent who neither saves the world nor gets the girl. The 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale retains a single holdover from the Brosnan movies: Judi Dench's M—presumably because Casino Royale's creative brain trust correctly intuited that no actor in the world was better suited to the role.

But M was the only familiar face in this very, very different take on 007. The bold departures from the franchise's long history began with the leading man, Daniel Craig, who was instantly deemed too blonde and uncouth by a bevy of outraged fans. (Amazingly, the original anti-Craig fansite DanielCraigIsNotBond.com is still extant. "THIS IS NOT A DANIEL CRAIG HATE SITE," the site explains today. "Daniel Craig is not the devil, merely a talented actor who we feel was miscast as James Bond.")

Ian Fleming's original novel provided the basic framework: A short, grim story about a secret agent who neither saves the world nor gets the girl.

In appearance and style, Craig was certainly an unconventional choice for the role; also-rans like Goran Visnjic and Henry Cavill, with their dark, chiseled good looks, fit the typical concept of 007 much more neatly. But casting Craig ended up serving a dual purpose: It clearly severed Casino Royale from the movies that came before it, and ensured that an exceptionally talented actor would chart the course for Bond's future. Conventional wisdom holds that a successful performance in a blockbuster owes as much to stuntmen as it does to actors, but dismissing Craig's contributions would be doing a disservice to his extraordinary performance. His Bond—steely, precise, intelligent, and controlled, with a bitter, seething core that sometimes tips over into outright cruelty—channels the best of Fleming's work and brings it squarely into the 21st century.

Casino Royale's cast was filled out with a slew of up-and-coming talents: Eva Green as the guarded, alluring Vesper Lynd, played with such deft complexity that it should have put the catch-all term "Bond Girl" to bed for good; Mads Mikkelsen as the chillingly amoral Le Chiffre, dripping sweat and blood as his arrogance spirals into self-destructiveness; and Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, Bond's laconic, soft-spoken CIA ally. It's no coincidence that each of these actors has gone on to considerable success in film and TV in the decade since Casino Royale's release.

The screenplay for Casino Royale follows the basic structure laid out by Fleming: James Bond is assigned to play cards against Le Chiffre—an international criminal whose bankroll is running low—in a high-stakes game at the Casino Royale. If Bond wins, he'll have toppled a villain who might be persuaded to rat on more villains; if he loses, the British government will have directly financed terrorism. Over the course of the mission, Bond reluctantly but helplessly falls in love with his ally, Vesper—and after defeating Le Chiffre (and surviving a grueling round of torture that pushes the PG-13 rating to its absolute limit), discovers that Vesper is a double agent who has been blackmailed into betraying him all along. By the end of the story, Vesper is dead, and Bond has forced himself to believe he doesn't care: In a line pulled directly from the novel, he coldly shrugs, "the bitch is dead."

This was not the James Bond audiences had grown accustomed to over the previous decades of movies. There was still plenty of action—including an all-time great chase sequence that saw Bond parkour-ing all over a construction site in pursuit of a suspect—but the tone was smarter and more elegiac, with a corker of an ending that never quite let you overlook the murkiness of Bond's ultimate victory.

Casino Royale is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime movie you can only make with a franchise as old as this one, because so much of the joy comes in how it riffs on our knowledge of everything that came before. Some moments lay it on a little thick—like when Bond snarls that he doesn't give a damn whether his martini is shaken or stirred. But others—like Le Chiffre casually mocking villains who resort to "elaborate tortures" before beating Bond's exposed genitals with a rope, or the brilliant decision to withhold Monty Norman's immortal "James Bond Theme" until the closing credits—speak to the care with which every seemingly unquestionable aspect of 007 was considered in the effort to make him feel relevant again.

Casino Royale is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime movie you can only make with a franchise as old as this one.

And the adaptation didn't just modernize a novel that had been written more than 50 years earlier; it improved it. As written by Fleming, Vesper is a little thin—an idealized femme fatale with an inner life we never learn very much about. Her death in the novel is a suicide; she leaves a note explaining she was a double agent working for Russia all along, and killed herself when she realized her former employers would never leave her alone. The film wisely complicates this nasty twist of the knife, giving both Bond and Vesper more agency in her tragic fate. Bond learns about Vesper's plight before she dies, and despite his fury tries desperately to save her when she ends up trapped underwater. And Vesper, in a final act of sabotage, leaves Bond a valuable parting gift: the information required to track down the mysterious organization that orchestrated her doom in the first place, setting the stage for a new future for the 007 franchise.

So what happened next? At the risk of damning with a compliment, my biggest problem with Casino Royale is that it might have been too good to spawn a follow-up that could equal it. The next film, Quantum of Solace, was a valiant attempt at a direct sequel that ended up being inferior in every conceivable way. The movie after that, Skyfall, is a crowd-pleaser with a truly memorable villain and the clever reintroductions of Moneypenny and Q—but it's still a step away from Casino Royale's smaller, darker Bond and toward the excesses of the Roger Moore era. And last year's Spectre—which featured Bond's arch-nemesis Blofeld for the first time in more than thirty years—was a flat-out disaster, saddling Bond with a love interest who was so unconvincing, in part, because Casino Royale had done such a remarkable job of selling Vesper as the one love of Bond's life.

Ten years after the release of Casino Royale, the James Bond franchise remains at a crossroads; today, it's not even clear whether Daniel Craig will play 007 again, or who might replace him if he doesn't. But whatever happens to Bond and the Daniel Craig era next, Casino Royale is a towering and singular accomplishment for the 007 franchise: the rare moment when a Hollywood studio actually took a gamble with everything it had, and won.